The focus of this book is the expansion of the Swedish navy and the founding of a naval city, and the manner in which this may have influenced the formation of the Swedish state. The period treated stretches from 1680 – when the Swedish government decided to establish a new naval base and to that end founded the naval city of Karlskrona – to the latter part of the eighteenth century, when large-scale production at the naval base was increasingly in evidence. The primary concern is the way in which small, everyday structures can change and influence the process of state-formation; how actual conflicts on the ground, conflict resolution, and the handling of manufacturing problems and disease seem to converge to make up the pattern we have subsequently characterized as modernity, as elements in a state-formation process. As a rule, research on state-formation takes its starting-point in an interest in the expansion of the land-based military forces in the early modern period. The basis for the present study, however, is research that has concentrated on the rise of the navies and their influence on state-formation, central to which here is the expansion of the Swedish navy, the new technological challenges it faced, changes in military leadership, and the immense costs and risks involved, all of which meant the Admiralty and navy were forced into new ways of thinking, and old social relationships and patterns were re-examined. The navy evolved into a catalyst for change.

The study comprises three sub-studies, all of which contribute to a greater understanding of the overarching theme. The first sub-study deals with political culture, the patterns of interaction that evolved in the encounter between a citizenry with a deeply rooted merchant culture and an executive with strong centralizing ambitions, and draws on the literature that shows a Habermasian critical approach, in which the focus is on the forms the populace’s interactions took in the early modern period. It shows how political spatiality shaped the realm and how what we now term ‘private’ and ‘public’ became categories to be taken into account in the encounters between the various parties concerned. It was as part of this process that when it came to negotiation and compromise a pattern of interaction evolved that was for the most part authoritarian in nature. For the government and the navy it was a matter of winning over independent citizens, whose trade networks they wished to tap, in order to realize their foreign policy ambitions. All-too authoritarian intervention on the part of the government would in this case have been counterproductive.

The second sub-study deals with the emergence of large-scale manufacturing, which evolved independently of the townsmen and craftsmen’s control. It takes as its starting-point the literature that seeks to problematize the term ‘proto-industrialism’. The pressures of a tense international situation and consequent military–political considerations led the government to invest heavily in the Swedish navy. As a consequence, larger volumes of materiel were the order of the day. The sub-study highlights the production of bread and snaps in particular. The shipyard engineers designed and constructed manufacturing facilities and machines to solve their production problems. The principles of standardization, experimentation, and engineering design arrived on the scene. Manual production was abandoned, at least in some manufacturing branches. The upshot was that old, ingrained social hierarchies of production and power were challenged and abandoned.

The third sub-study concerns the plague that hit Karlskrona and the navy alike in 1710, and which would come to threaten the navy’s very existence. Its theoretical basis is the Foucaultian field of research on disease and disease control as a part of a shift in the balance of power, for it demonstrates that it was doctors, not priests, who stood at the Admiralty leadership’s right hand as advisors and experts. Religious rhetoric, as an explanatory model, was indeed in evidence, but played a subordinate role. The subsequent systemization centred on a belief in human – or rather learned doctors’ – powers of observation and ability to draw conclusions. Categorization, separation, and control were the key-words in the process. Against this was the populace’s grass-roots, religiously inspired behaviour; behaviour that in their rulers’ eyes was a threat to the natural order and had to be suppressed. Doctors with their ‘science’ and the military with their brute power made for a powerful combination in the struggle against what they saw as disorder. On the heels of this battle against the plague, the navy furthermore appeared in the guise of the defender of fundamental ‘welfare’, to use a modern expression. At the peak of the crisis, the naval base was the lone institution able to offer the promise of food and medicine. The first basic hospitals also began to take shape.

So, three ‘tracks’ in a Swedish state-formation process: a political culture with a particular interaction pattern for policy; new forms of production that left their mark on central social relationships in society as a whole; and fresh thinking on how to combat disease that, as a form of logic, resulted in a power shift and social change. Was this all brought about by the navy and the Admiralty? The answer is no, far from it. Similar processes can be identified in other contexts. On the other hand, the external pressures and historical circumstances were such that the Admiralty and the navy at this point constituted an arena where these processes of change could find expression.